America and Cosmic Man is preoccupied with the notion that a new human type has developed in America. In Lewis’s view, U.S. citizenship is something as unique as it is extraordinary; it differs radically from what in Europe is understood by “nationality.” The United States is afrag-mentary, most imperfect, and in some respects grotesque advance-copy of a future world-order…. It is a Brotherhood rather than a “People.” Americans have something more than nationality. In its place they have what amounts almost to a religion; a “way of life.”...

It is in his chapters on the three presidents—the three political mes-siahs of the twentieth century—whom he has chosen as his representative figures that Lewis is at once most perceptive and most devastating. “All that he did,” he writes of Franklin Roosevelt, “whether wittingly or not—and much he was responsible for—was good. He was, however, the archetype of the democratic autocrat—the ‘Tsar’ or ‘Caesar.’ Though—typically—not a New Dealer, he was firmly cemented into a Caesarian power by that remarkable organization [the New Deal]—since Jefferson’s democratic societies the greatest revolutionary phenomenon in the United States.”...

There remains the question, raised at the beginning of this article, of why America and Cosmic Man was almost totally ignored when it was published in 1948—certainly by academic historians. The answers are probably obvious enough. It fell under no recognizable historical canon. Its author was not a historian, nor was the book orthodox history, or even unorthodox history. In my view, it belongs with such classics as William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature.